Statement by Ryan Heath on Cyber Security Strategy

On 5 February 2013, Ryan Heath, Spokesperson of Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the EC in charge of Digital Agenda, made a statement on the cyber security strategy of the European Commission.
He explained the Communication on Cyber Security Strategy that the Commission adopted that day. The Communication and a complementary proposal for a Directive on measures aim at ensuring a high common level of cyber security across the EU. The Communication will outline the EU's vision of how security can be enhanced in cyberspace from a wide perspective and set out the actions required, including that of drastically reducing cybercrime through a strong legal framework, improving the capability of Member States and coordination at EU level to fight it. It will also outline major principles of the EU international cyberspace policy, which seeks to promote freedom and openness of the Internet, to protect fundamental rights online worldwide as well as to increase engagement with EU international partners in strengthening cyber security. As network and information systems are globally interconnected, cyber security does not stop at borders. Lack of intervention at EU level would lead to a situation where each Member State would act alone disregarding the interdependences amongst network and information systems. Action at EU level will aim to ensure that an appropriate degree of coordination takes place among the Member States so that governments' measures are consistent with each other, and risks are well managed in the cross-border context in which they arise.

Only the original language version is authentic and it prevails in the event of its differing from the translated versions.
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00:00:05

10:00:05

SOUNDBITE by Ryan Heath, Spokesperson of Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the EC in charge of Digital Agenda, (in ENGLISH) saying that cyber crime is obviously a growing problem; the damage is now running into hundreds of billions of euros a year; what that means for an individual company is: if you are a small business, that could mean tens of thousands of euros damage; if you are a large company, we can talk about 51 hundred million euros worth of damage for a serious state of bridge; not to mention the affect on your reputation; so, we are really at a situation where the cost of not acting is a lot greater than the cost of acting.

00:00:30

10:00:35

SOUNDBITE by Ryan Heath (in ENGLISH) saying that the overall strategy that the EC is proposing is grounded in the idea that we want you to have the same rights online as you do offline; and the only way to be really free when you are operating online is to have a sense of security; so, the EC works across the areas of cybercrime, cyber defence, resilient networks; they want people to understand that it is not just about situations where your personal data might go missing or be used by criminals; it could be a range of different things: whether it is a storm causing electricity networks to go out, whether it is some other technical problem, all of these things can be cyber incidents; what is important is that we all find ways to, first of all, prevent the networks going down, to know how we are going to cooperate if the network does go down and make sure that we can be transparent about it so that we get rid of this idea that it is a shame or there is a stigma to admitting if you have been a victim of a cyber attack of faced a network problem; if we start sharing information about this, we will be much better at preventing it in the future.

00:01:10

10:01:46

SOUNDBITE by Ryan Heath (in ENGLISH) saying that it is really a problem that some Members States have a high level of cyber security preparation and others have quite a low level; so they need to try and lift everybody up so that they are all operating at a higher standard and to get better Member States trusting the other Member States in what they're doing; if the EU can provide that coordination or the prompt or the framework for doing that, then that is the service they think they are providing.

00:00:27

10:02:14

SOUNDBITE by Ryan Heath (in ENGLISH) saying that everyone has a responsibility to be ready; that means basic things like changing a password straight away, going to the police and the relevant national authorities; a crime that happens online, is the same as a crime that happens offline, we are still all protected by the same laws; it also means working with the authorities if you happen to be a larger organisation, to make sure it doesn't happen to you gain; so, you need to be preventing, cooperating and transparent.